Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSONNot what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
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German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.
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How can I regain even for a minute the feeling of ample leisure I had during my early, my creative years? Then I seldom felt fussed, or hurried.
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I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
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As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
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One can repent even of having repented.
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Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
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When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
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Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
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There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
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We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
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The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique – without which however it cannot exist at all.
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In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.
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I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
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Enemies could become the best companions. Companionship is based on a common interest, and the greater the interest the closer the companionship. What makes enemies of people, if not the eagerness, the passion for the same thing?
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Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
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Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
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Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.
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A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
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Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSON